The Icarus Project

Pay dirt. Days later, Wikelski’s sensors detected “dynamic body acceleration,” meaning the animals expended dramatically more energy than usual as many as 14 hours before the aftershocks hit, at times when they’d normally be asleep or docile. He’s putting the finishing touches on a study, due out later this year in the journal Science, that solidifies the concept of movement ecology—the causes and effects of organisms’ movements on the world around them. The sensors turn animals into something like environmental buoys, using them to predict and monitor things beyond earthquakes, perhaps illustrating environmental patterns with broad economic significance for humans. The big data collected from the animals can “do absolutely crazy things,” he says.

Soon the best example will be Wikelski’s Icarus project, an open-source online database designed to follow animals around the world via embedded tracking devices that relay their locations to a satellite scheduled for launch in October. He says the 16-year venture by the Max Planck Institute, the German Aerospace Center, and the Russian Federal Space Agency has tagged dozens of mammals, birds, fish, and even flying insects with the tiny tracking sensors, usually with super glue. With help from volunteers who sign up online, he says, he expects to hit a few thousand by the end of next year.